


your integrity makes me seem small (you paint dreamscapes on the wall)

by masqueraders



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bellamy Blake Deserves A Happy Ending, F/F, F/M, Multi, Slow Burn, and they were ROOMMATES, bellamy is a grad student, clarke is a mess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:54:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26432257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/masqueraders/pseuds/masqueraders
Summary: "Sometimes, Clarke looks at Bellamy and sees the sun.He smiles and it’s bright and he’s her best friend in the whole world. They can do anything they want, and she loves him. She doesn’t think she could live without him."or;bellamy and clarke live together and for each other, and eventually, they'll figure it out
Relationships: Bellamy Blake & Raven Reyes, Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Clarke Griffin & Raven Reyes, Clarke Griffin & Wells Jaha, Octavia Blake & Clarke Griffin, Octavia Blake/Lincoln
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39





	1. suddenly this summer it's clear (i never had the courage of my convictions)

Sometimes, Clarke looks at Bellamy and sees the sun.

He smiles and it’s bright and he’s her best friend in the whole world. They can do anything they want, and she loves him. She doesn’t think she could live without him.

They move in together the summer after Wells dies, and Bellamy keeps her warm. He cooks for them most nights, lets their living room fill up with half-painted canvases and dirty brushes, doesn’t complain when she takes long showers.

(She’s been taking a lot of long showers, these past few months. If Clarke Griffin is anything, it is too proud to let people see her cry.)

It’s Saturday, which usually means Clarke will wake up to find Bellamy making breakfast. She’ll take it with her to the living room floor, where she will stare at an empty canvas for a few hours before flopping down on the couch and griping about how bored she is. Bellamy will look up from his chair where he is, somehow, every time, reading the biggest book Clarke has ever seen. She will ask him to read to her, and when he decides to stop for the day, they will settle in together on the couch and watch a Harry Potter movie. Bellamy will be wearing his glasses.

Clarke loves Saturdays. But this one is different.

She wakes first when it’s still dark out, the crickets buzzing outside her window. There’s another sound she can’t quite identify, and only after she twists around in her sheets a few times does she realize the sound is coming from her. Her hand goes to her throat.

Logically, she knows that she’s wheezing. She can _hear_ herself wheezing, can feel the hot air expelled from her lungs as it fans across her wrists. But she feels the lump in her throat growing larger. In the dark, there is nothing to ground her to reality, only the last few pieces of her nightmare entangled in her hair, threatening to drag her back under. She tries to call out for help, but no sound comes out. She can’t breathe. She’s going to die here, alone.

When she closes her eyes, she’s underwater. She can feel her legs get caught in a current, thrashes wildly for the surface, for _something_ to grab onto. The water turns red before her eyes, the taste in her mouth metallic. Someone is bleeding – is she bleeding? Something hard clamps around her wrist and she lets herself be pulled.

When she opens her eyes, Bellamy is there, standing by her bedside, eyes wild in the dim moonlight. His hands hold her wrists down on either side of her head, and she feels a sharp pain on her neck that tells her she’s been clawing at it. They sit quietly for a moment, both their chests heaving. Clarke takes a deep breath. The air is cold as she swallows it.

She wiggles her arms, prompting him to release her. As she sits up, he sits back onto the floor, hanging his head between his knees. From this angle, she can’t get a read on his face when he looks back up at her.

“Better?” He asks. Clarke nods, before she realizes he can’t see her.

“Yeah,” She winces at the mangled sound of her own voice, “Thank you.”

She watches Bellamy’s silhouette as he falls down on his back, scrubbing his hand over his face. A kind of chill goes through her, as she wonders what horrible sounds she must’ve been making that Bellamy had woken up and rushed in here. How long had she been asleep again? How many times had he tried to revive her?

“It’s getting worse,” He says from the floor. Clarke leans back on her pillows and stares up at the ceiling, taking stock of the pattern the moonlight has created. When she was a kid, she put glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling. When she couldn’t sleep, she’d stare at them for hours, imagining she was in the middle of the galaxy, letting the quiet vacuum of space lull her to sleep. She’d even arranged them into constellations, constantly shifting them when she had the time to check the accuracy. Two always remained, though. Cancer and Virgo. Her zodiac sign and –

“It’s his birthday.” She tells him. The ghost of glow-in-the-dark stars flicker in and out of view. “What’s the point of celebrating someone’s birthday if they’re never going to get any older?” She feels the weight of her comment sit on her chest and hold her in place, wonders if it’s doing the same thing to Bellamy. She thinks of all the people they’ve lost. Death has always been a sort of ambivalent companion to Clarke, quietly walking alongside her since she was a little girl. Sometimes he rattles his chains, like a warning, and Clarke will instinctively close her eyes. When she opens them, someone is gone.

She thinks her companion must be getting frustrated with her. She’d done something, a few years ago, that had changed things – changed _her_. It had been her time. He had come for her, then. And he had tried again this past spring. Both times, he missed her. Both times, he took someone away from her instead.

Clarke doesn’t feel like she lives life inside her body. She thinks about her fingers and they twitch by her side, but her mind spins out of control. She watches from above, like she’s sitting on a star, as things happen to the person she used to see in the mirror. It’s a side effect, it must be. A glitch in the system. She was supposed to die at sixteen, and maybe in another universe she did. And on her way to the other side, this parallel Clarke had somehow passed through their world and taken a piece of her as a souvenir.

_That’s it,_ she reminds herself sometimes, _something is missing. I think it’s me_.

The only thing that really grounds her is Bellamy. She hears herself saying his name as she sinks back into her body.

“Yeah?” Still on the floor, waiting as long as she needs.

“Don’t leave, okay?”

It’s quiet for a moment. This is far from the first time Clarke has made this request of him, yet still, every time, her stomach twists in anticipation of his inevitable abandonment. The day she becomes too much for Bellamy, she thinks, she will fall out of existence. Not shatter in some horribly explosive way, but simply burn up until there is nothing left of her, only the memory of someone who got too close to the sun.

( _Icarus_ , Bellamy would say, _again_?)

His voice cuts through the room. “Okay.”

Clarke throws him down one of her pillows. She doesn’t wake again until morning. 

The drive to Alpha gets shorter every time she makes it. Her sense of dread swells the closer she gets to her old town. (She can’t bear to call it _home_ anymore.) She pulls up to the curb in front of the Jahas’ house, and her car sighs with her when the key comes out of the ignition.

She texts Raven, _I’m here._

Almost immediately, a car door across the street swings open, and Clarke sees her friend. She hurries to unbuckle her seat belt and meets her for a hug in the middle of the street.

“Thank the lord,” Raven says into Clarke’s hair, “I’ve been sitting here for forty-five minutes. I didn’t want to go in alone.” Clarke squeezes her harder.

“I miss you,” Clarke tells her, present tense. Raven pulls back from the hug to instead wind an arm around Clarke’s neck. They start their way to the front door.

“Come on,” Raven’s fingers pull on her friend’s cheek, “If you start crying now, you’ll be out by the time we get to the cemetery. And that’s just disrespectful.” Despite herself, Clarke laughs.

She’d met Raven before Wells did. The summer before her junior year of high school, she fell in love at sleepaway camp. Finn had nice hair and a goofy smile and an earnest look in his eye, and she thought he had a good heart. That was, until, two months into the school year, she received an Instagram DM from Raven that changed her mind.

_hey stranger_ , she’d written, _my boyfriend’s a dick. wanna know how i know that? because he’s your boyfriend, too!_

There’d been some bitterness between them, initially. But once they got around to talking about things other than Finn, they found a rhythm. Raven was opinionated, brazen, and a surprisingly good listener. She seemed to have skipped the step in every teenage girl’s life where they learn to be ashamed of their bodies. She brought out a femininity in Clarke that the latter had been trying so hard to tamp down over the years, thinking it was the only way her peers could ever see her as a leader. That year, she made captain of the swim team – only the second junior ever to do so. Raven had gifted her a pair of pink goggles.

Clarke introduced them that winter. She knew they’d complement each other well – where Raven was loud, Wells was quiet; both of them whip-smart and keenly astute. Wells was also a good listener, and he had a way of pulling a story out of a person. (Clarke had always found it a bit annoying, how he could do that. And he would _pull_ and _pull_ until all the tension was unspooled before him.) Raven didn’t talk much about her past, but Clarke had always sensed that she wanted to, eventually. If Clarke wasn’t the person for that, she didn’t mind. As long as it was someone.

And of course, it was Wells. They’d clicked like puzzle pieces.

Clarke’s pretty sure Wells fell in love with Raven the moment he saw her. Her calm and collected best friend was a stuttering mess the first few times they’d all hung out. Once, when Raven wasn’t looking, Clarke pressed the back of her hand to Wells’ cheek and found it burning hot. He’d swatted her away, mumbling something about the AC being too low. Clarke had laughed in his face.

It took Raven a long time to get over Finn. They’d known each other since they were in diapers – been dating practically as long. She went back and forth with Clarke a lot about keeping Finn in her life. ( _“He’s my Wells_ ,” she’d said to Clarke one day, “ _Could you live without Wells?_ ”)

(Clarke knows now that the answer is _no_.)

Three years after they’d met, during winter break of their sophomore year of college, Wells and Raven had finally bitten the bullet. Clarke still doesn’t know who made the first move. All she knows is that Wells dropped her off first one night, and when she went to pick up Raven for breakfast in the morning, Wells had sheepishly appeared at the front door in the same clothes from the night before. He got in his car and drove off without a word. Clarke had given him a double thumbs up when he passed her window. Raven gave her the finger.

Spring break, he died. Raven didn’t speak to anyone for five days. Then she had called Clarke, and cried, and cried.

Raven raps her knuckles now on what used to be Wells’ front door. Thelonious Jaha answers almost immediately, a gentle smile on his worn face.

“Girls, it’s good to see you,” Clarke can tell he means it, “Though I wish it were under happier circumstances.” He doesn’t hug them, Clarke notes. Growing up, Thelonious was like a father to her. She can still picture the world as it looked from where she would sit perched on his shoulders. Can conjure the smell his cologne from memory. But he had changed, since Wells. She couldn’t remember the last time she was even close enough to inhale his cologne for real. Maybe he doesn’t even smell like it anymore, she can’t help but think, maybe he’s not quite the person he used to be, either.

Bellamy texts her on the way to the cemetery. The car ride has been awkward. Thelonious has the radio on low as he attempts to make polite conversation with the two girls in his backseat. Clarke’s mother sits shotgun, staring intently at the side of Thelonious’s head. Occasionally, she’ll glance back and meet Clarke’s eye with something that looks like sympathy, and Clarke will look away.

**Bellamy** [1:42 PM]: Get there okay?

**Me** [1:42 PM]: unfortunately.

She watches the three dots appear, then disappear, then appear, then disappear again.

“Clarke?”

Her head shoots up. “Hmm?” Jaha is looking her in the eye through the rearview mirror.

“I asked how your classes are going this semester.” It’s a loaded question. Clarke feels herself squirm without meaning to.

Everyone had told her to take the semester off. (“ _Med school will still be there six months later,_ ” her mother had said, “ _We need to make sure you’ll still be there, too._ ”) She’d thought her mother was being a bit overdramatic. Sure, the course load was heavy, but it was nothing she wasn’t used to. Not to mention, it was a welcome distraction. The more she focused on organic chemistry, the less time she would have to think about Wells’ body in the ground.

(Only, at the same time, she would find herself reading her textbook and absorbing information about the human body only to mentally run through the scientific process of his death. A spasm of the larynx, hypoxemia, the body becomes acidotic, the blood flow stops to the brain –

At this point she will pick up her textbook and lob it at the nearest wall. Bellamy will drop a blanket around her shoulders and put the book back on its shelf. Then, Clarke will take a long shower.)

“Classes are going great,” She lies, “I like chem a lot better than physics.” A half lie. She’s stupendously bad at physics, but she’d constantly used Raven to cheat on her assignments. Not that Raven’s bad at chemistry, it’s just not quite her forte.

They chat some more about Clarke’s schedule before he moves on to Raven. Clarke sighs in relief as her phone screen lights up.

**Bellamy** [1:47 PM]: Making lasagna for dinner. Raven’s welcome to come.

She doesn’t know why he took five minutes to say that, but she shows the message to Raven, anyway. After she confirms her friend’s attendance, she clicks her phone off and rests her head back against her seat, letting her eyes wander out the window as they approach their destination. Her camp friends had once told her that she had to hold her breath any time she went by a cemetery, or else a ghost could get into her body.

It seems ironic, now.

Still, she finds that her breathing stills almost unconsciously. When she spots a big family huddled around two graves a little ways away, she releases the breath as subtly as she can. Hopefully, she thinks, any ghosts around will go for them first. She has enough already.

When she gets home, Bellamy is asleep on the couch with an open book on his chest and his glasses falling down his nose. She takes them both from him gingerly, setting the glasses on the side table and bringing the book to the shelf. She laughs a little to herself when she sees what it is – _The Iliad_ , nearly torn in half and falling apart from the amount of times Bellamy has read it over the years. Clarke had tried to sit down with it once, at Bellamy’s behest, but she didn’t really get it. She likes the old stories that sound like magic. _The Iliad_ just seemed sad.

(How something sad could be so comforting to him was beside her, but Bellamy was weird and morbid like that. It’s why they worked.)

She slides it into place next to _The Odyssey_ and turns back to his prone form. Bellamy is soft with Clarke, but she is no stranger to the hard lines of his face. He’s almost always scowling at something or clenching his jaw – which Clarke has tried to get him to stop doing more times than she could count – or flaring his nostrils, which is a bit funny, if she’s being honest. Outside of this apartment, Bellamy is constantly on guard. All thick lines and sharp edges. In his sleep, his cheeks are round and soft, and his forehead is smooth of any wrinkles. He looks young, Clarke thinks. Not that she had known him when he was young – well, not really. Bellamy’s been too old for his age for a long time.

She ducks into her room to change into sweats. Crawling into bed feels like salvation. She makes it an episode and a half into _New Girl_ before Bellamy appears in her doorway, still shaking off sleep.

“How was it?” His voice is small. She closes her computer.

_Excruciating_ , she wants to say. Standing around Wells’ grave like that, wishing a happy birthday to a person who wasn’t there, hanging out with her _mother_. But when she pauses, she realizes it was also kind of nice to be with Raven on such a hard day for them both. Her and Raven are a forever thing – bound together by the pain that now _two_ boys have caused them. It’s always good to see her.

“Sad.” She says. And she knows he understands what she’s thinking.

“I was gonna start cooking now.”

She nods. “I’ll text Raven.” She expects him to shove off the doorframe, to maneuver into the kitchen. But he stays put, scratching the back of his neck like he does when he wants to say something he’s not sure she wants to hear. “What is it?”

He stares at floor as he responds. “Wells really liked my lasagna. I told him how to make it once, but I don’t think he ever remembered.” He clears his throat, and the small smile that had crept onto his face. “I know I didn’t really know him that well, but I miss him sometimes, too.”

He leaves then, and it occurs to Clarke for the first time that maybe, if she’d asked him about the cemetery, he would’ve liked to have gone with her.

When Clarke thinks of home, she thinks of Bellamy’s cooking.

She gets what people mean, when they say to put love into the things you make. Bellamy’s warmth is in every meal he gives her, like Prometheus bringing fire to the ancient Greeks. A gift that makes her days burn a little brighter.

The Griffins were never really a family that cooked. Even before her father died, Clarke had eaten most of her dinners in that house alone, or with friends, or with nannies, or with boys she’d pretended to sneak in when she knew there was no one around to catch her. Her parents worked hard to give her the life she had, and she was grateful for it. But they also worked late. Her mother is a surgeon whose memorized thousands of people inside out and still doesn’t know her own daughter. Her father was an engineer who wanted to make the world a better place. He cared deeply about people. He listened to his community. Clarke just wished he had spent a little more time listening to her.

That doesn’t mean she didn’t – doesn’t – love him. But for eighteen years, she’d needed more, and she’d looked for it in a million places. In Wells, in Finn, in Raven. She could never explain the hunger she had, only that she had yet found it to be insatiable. And then she met Bellamy, and for the first time in her life, she felt _full_. It was more.

Bellamy was more.

She’d probably be dead without him, she thinks. They’d cut her open and find an empty stomach and a broken heart, and they’d shake their heads at yet another young woman who leaned too far into her loss until she had no more to gain.

“Clarke? Are you still with us?”

She blinks a few times. Raven and Bellamy are both staring at her from the other side of the table with twin faces of amusement. Clarke swallows.

“I’ve decided to marry this lasagna.”

“I’m glad you like it.” Bellamy says, and Clarke rolls her eyes.

“He says that every time,” She tells Raven, “As if I’ve ever hated something he’s made.”

Bellamy pouts. “You never eat my brussels sprouts.”

“Brussels sprouts are gross.” The girls respond in unison. Raven flicks a basil leaf over at Clarke with a grin.

She likes this togetherness she feels, with her two favorite people in the same room. They never really hung out just the three of them, before. Wells had always been the comfortable buffer between them all. And, honestly, for a while there, Clarke had been scared Bellamy and Raven would never get along. The first time they met, Raven had punched him in the face. Granted, it was a misunderstanding of both of them thinking they were acting in Clarke’s best interest, but that resentment lingered. Clarke could see it in the narrowing of Raven’s eyes whenever Clarke brought him along somewhere, could feel it in the tensing of Bellamy’s muscles beneath his shirt, like he was getting ready for a fight.

Clarke knows that without Wells’ death, she never could’ve had this. It’s a horrible thought – that something good has come out of something so awful. But she watches as Bellamy chuckles at the story Raven’s telling, as his hand shoots up instantly to catch her fork when she almost knocks it off the table in a moment of passion, and she knows that it _is_ good. An uneasy twist of guilt settles around her stomach.

( _How dare you?_ Her body hums, _how dare you be happy without him?_ )

She doesn’t want to finish her lasagna after that, but she does. She hopes that he will get the message from her clean plate: _thank you for doing this._

_Thank you for keeping me alive._

Clarke had tried to turn in early, tried to make the miserable day shorter than it was, but her brain had other ideas. She couldn’t stop thinking about the day in middle school when Wells gave her her first kiss.

(“I just want to get it over with,” She’d told him honestly, “Don’t you?” She hadn’t known at the time how Wells felt about her, hadn’t really thought much of the way his eyes darted around the room, focusing on anything but her.

“Are you sure?” He’d repeated himself six times.

Clarke had rolled her eyes. “Of course I’m sure. You’re my best friend, and I love you. All the stupid movies say your first kiss should be with someone you love.”

“I think that’s about having sex, actually.”

“Are you going to kiss me or not?” She waited. When Wells didn’t move, she sighed. “I’m going to close my eyes. You can kiss me or you can go downstairs and get some soda. Either way, when it’s over, we never have to talk about it again.” Her eyes shut tight almost before she could register the thought, and it occurred to her for the first time that she was nervous, too.

The room was quiet for a moment. Then she’d felt the gentle press of his mouth on hers, and she brought her hand up to Wells’ shoulder, and they stayed like that for a few seconds until he pulled back first.

It wasn’t spectacular by any means – they were twelve, and it was awkward, and they’d barely moved their mouths the entire time. But it meant a lot to Clarke nonetheless.

“Thank you,” She’d said.

“I’m gonna get some sodas.”

She found out years later that it hadn’t been Wells’ first kiss. He just hadn’t wanted to ruin her special moment by admitting he had kissed Glass Sorenson at camp the previous summer. Glass had never been particularly fond of Clarke, it was the best way Wells could think of to squash his pesky crush. It hadn’t worked, so he hadn’t told her. He used to not tell her a lot of things.)

Her throat is dry. She throws back her covers and slides out of bed, fumbling in the dark to make a clear path to the door.

She finds Bellamy and Raven on the couch, cartoons on the TV. Neither of them turns when she enters the room.

“What time is it?” She asks them, if only to make sure they’re aware of her presence.

Bellamy doesn’t look at her. “Around 2.”

“You guys couldn’t sleep either?”

The only response she gets is from Spongebob. Squidward is curled up on the floor of a pristine room coming to terms with the collapse of everything he’s ever known. Clarke hates this episode. And she knows for a fact that Bellamy hates this show because it was the only thing Octavia ever wanted to watch a child, and that the sound of Spongebob’s laugh activates his fight-or-flight response.

But her mind is too fraught to analyze that now. She continues into the kitchen, pulling the brita from the fridge and her favorite mug from the cabinet. It’s chipped in a few places and stained at the bottom from so many years of use, but she could never bear to throw it out. Clarke had gotten a stomach virus the night before their eighth-grade trip to Hershey Park. She’d told her parents she’d bring three bottles of ibuprofen in her suitcase, but they still wouldn’t let her go. She didn't speak to them for four days, until the trip was over and she was better and she had to ask them to drive her to Wells’ house. When he opened his front door, Wells had a smile on his face and the mug in his hand.

Clarke runs her finger over one of the cracks. The thing is an awful bright blue. A Hershey kiss with bug eyes holds its arm out to her, a smaller kiss in its palm. She had made some throwaway comment, when he had given it to her, about the suggested cannibalism. Wells had rolled his eyes and offered to keep it for himself. _No_ , she told him, _I want it._

(She tended to get in her own way when she wanted things from people. She supposes she’s always been afraid of loving something that she could lose.)

Bellamy’s voice sounds from behind her, causing her to jump.

“Nightmares again?”

Her fingers close tighter around the mug. A flash runs through her mind of her dropping it, watching it shatter into a million pieces, feeling this tangible connection to Wells dissipate before her eyes. Bellamy’s eyes flicker down to her hands, and when she follows them, she sees that her knuckles are white.

“I just wish I could turn off my brain.” She admits. He quirks up his lip at that, before his face changes to something more serious. He moves closer to her, gently prying the mug out of her hands and resting it on the counter. She stares at him. “What?”

And then he’s hugging her so tightly her vision goes black for a second. Her arms go up around him of their own accord, instincts working faster than thought. It’s dark in the kitchen, but Clarke can sense every inch of him, could name the freckles dotting his chest where it meets her cheek. Bellamy is solid, and warm, and alive.

She presses her ear closer to him, and the steady beat of his heart feels like reassurance. Her breath matches its pace, she realizes, like they are the head and the heart of one body. She presses closer still, near impossible at this point. Bellamy shifts his head from her hair, and for a moment she’s terrified that he will pull away, but he only brings his mouth to hover next to her ear.

“I’ve got you,” He tells her. Bellamy is the best person she knows.

In the morning, he says, “You’re my best friend.”

Clarke looks up from the canvas she’s sat in front of – painting an actual picture for the first time in months. She’s been working on the shape of Raven’s jaw for the better part of twenty minutes, since her friend left with a hug and a promise to call soon.

_You too_ , she wants to say, but it comes out as: “I am?”

He’s fidgeting, and he’s standing with his shoulders hunched forward, and he won’t look at her. His glasses are perched so precariously on the tip of his nose that she’s worried they might fall. She raises her eyebrows at his demeanor.

“I just want to make sure you know that.” He states instead of explaining.

“Okay.” Clarke mutters, and turns back to her painting. Bellamy’s put up with a lot of weird behavior from her over the years, the least she could do is return the favor. She’ll ask about it when he’s ready. She dips her brush in a glob of red, shifting her focus to the undertones of Raven’s cheeks. She’s just touched the tip of it to the canvas when Bellamy speaks again.

“I slept with Raven.” He says.

Clarke leaves her body. When she settles back into it, she finds that there is a red streak cutting through the length of Raven’s face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this in a blind rage after 7x13 and made an ao3 just to post it. if you haven't watched the episode yet, don't <3 
> 
> completely unbeta'd, so my bad for the probably obscene amount of errors in here.
> 
> also i just really fucking love wells jaha and he deserved better
> 
> i have absolutely no idea where i want this story to go atm ! but we shall see


	2. i'm still on that trapeze (i'm still trying everything to keep you looking at me)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> another week, another disappointing episode, another reason for me to spew out 5000 words about how much i love bellamy blake

She met Bellamy her freshman year.

She was half-drunk in a club after bombing her history midterm that morning. Her roommate Niylah had promised that going out would make Clarke feel better, but the only thing she felt was awkward and cold.

(“That’s why you drink.” Niylah insisted, shoving a vodka cranberry into Clarke’s hands.)

Niylah had disappeared into the crowd twenty minutes prior when Clarke saw _her_. She ducked immediately, instinctively, cursing under her breath. She risked a glance upwards. Twenty feet away. Fifteen. Clarke was running out of time. She scanned the crowd for Niylah, and when she didn’t see her, she looked for someone bigger.

“Hi!” She practically gasped at the first man she saw over six feet, “Tall stranger! I need you to hide me.” His face had shifted from an uneasy smile to more stoic expression, his eyebrows drawing together. He offered his arms, and Clarke grabbed at his wrists and turned him until he was directly between her and the person she dreaded seeing.

“Thank you.” She breathed into his chest, pressing herself close to him. If she kept her face in his shirt, perhaps the other girl would never even recognize her.

“Someone bothering you?” His voice was deep.

“My ex-girlfriend is here,” Clarke explained, “And she is the last person I want to see today.” His jaw ticked, and he nodded sharply, craning his neck to look around the room. Clarke felt his arm come up behind her to rest on her shoulder.

“Okay?” He asked.

“Perfect,” She responded, “I’m Clarke.”

“Bellamy.”

She risked a glance over his shoulder, eyes finding her immediately.

Lexa was wearing a black miniskirt and a blue crop top that Clarke knew, even from a distance, matched her eyes. Her jacket was thrown over her shoulder, and Clarke hated that she remembered how it smelled – leather, rose, and mint. A combination she would loathe on anyone else.

“She still there?”

“Yup,” Clarke narrowed her eyes as Lexa and her friends laughed at something. They had never liked her, for some reason, always treated her with disdain. “I didn’t even know she was in the country.”

“Jesus,” Bellamy mused, “Bad breakup?”

“You have no idea.”

They had stayed like that – embracing each other, Clarke’s hand over his heart, feeling it beat in time with the music pulsating around them – for a long time. At a certain point, Clarke had stopped looking for Lexa, and started looking at Bellamy.

He was beautiful, in a mythic sort of way. Thick, curly hair, golden skin, big brown eyes that seemed to hold the entire room. There was a crescent shape cut drawing from the corner of his mouth to his eye, and Clarke wanted to paint him. Her fingers itched as she catalogued which colors she’d have to mix to get his exact skin tone, counted the freckles dotting across his cheek. She would’ve entirely missed when he asked her a question had she not been already staring at the curve of his mouth.

“What?” She said dumbly. The corner of his mouth quirked up.

“I asked if you go to school around here.”

“Oh,” She thought of her student ID, tucked away in her purse, replaced in the back of her phone with a shitty fake that told the bouncer she was from Ohio (as _if_ ), “Yeah. I go to Ark U.”

“Me too,” He leaned in closer then, his mouth by her ear. The music around them was so loud, Clarke could feel it in the tips of her fingers. Yet somehow, every word from Bellamy’s mouth was perfectly clear. “You’re a freshman, right?”

“That obvious?”

He tilted his head into her line of view. “Well, there’s this.” She felt a yank on something in her pocket, and when she looked down, she found Bellamy’s index finger caught in an Ark University lanyard hanging out of her skinny jeans. “Rookie mistake.”

“Shit.” She ripped it from her side and quickly stuffed it in her bag, “That’s embarrassing. I can’t believe they let me in. My ID says I’m 24.” Bellamy laughed. Clarke liked the sound of his laugh.

She stared at him again, and this time, he didn’t look away. She liked that about him, too. That he leveled with her. Didn’t back down. She felt a tug deep within her gut, something primal. There was a familiarity in Bellamy’s eyes, in the shape of his fingers. She remembers thinking that perhaps they’d already been pulled together in a past life, too.

“Hey,” She said, “Buy me a drink?” And he did.

They’d talked for what felt like hours, long past Niylah giving Clarke a kiss on the cheek and promising to see her tomorrow before leaving with a pretty brunette. At some point, Clarke completely forgot about the reason she’d run (literally) into Bellamy in the first place. Lexa was in the same room as her for the first time in months, but she was too pleasantly drunk to care. She felt _giddy_. She felt good.

She found out Bellamy was a senior, double majoring in classics ( _“I can help you get your history grade up, if you want.”_ ) and architecture, and that he had a sister a year younger than Clarke who he loved more than anyone else in the world. He was a local boy, born and raised in Brooklyn, and his drink of choice was a whiskey sour, which Clarke took a sip of and immediately spat back into his glass.

(She apologized profusely, but he only laughed at her. _Honestly_ , he’d said, _alcohol kills germs, and I’m too drunk to care._ He threw back the rest of the drink in one go. Clarke told him he was disgusting.)

She was on her third cosmo when she someone jostled her from behind. The glass tipped halfway to her lips, and suddenly her chest and lap were very, very cold.

“ _Fuck_!”

Her head was still fuzzy when she reached over the bar for some napkins, dabbing hopelessly at the very pink stain on her white shirt. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Clarke, hey, Clarke,” There was pressure on her wrist where Bellamy caught her, “Slow down, you’re making it worse.”

“Fuck, I’m so fucked, this isn’t my shirt,” The rest of the club was blurry, but she had suddenly been very hyperaware of her own body. She was shaking, she’d realized. “Niylah’s gonna kill me, I told her I wouldn’t get anything on her shirt. It’s a new shirt. She just bought it, she told me I couldn’t stain it.”

“Hey, Clarke,” Bellamy took both of her hands then, forcing her to stop, forcing her to look at him, “Calm down. We can get the stain out if we do it right now. Where’s your dorm?”

Clarke had started crying then, because her dorm was a twenty minute walk away, and she couldn’t go back to her dorm, because then she’d have to go into her room to get her laundry detergent, and then Niylah would be there with the pretty girl from the club, and she’d see the shirt, and she’d yell at Clarke, and then Clarke would have to move out to avoid the awkwardness, and then –

“Whoa, hey, hey,” Bellamy swiped a finger at her cheek, “No tears tonight, okay? Look, my apartment’s a few blocks away, you can use my washer, alright?” Clarke had thrown her arms around him so abruptly that she’d almost knocked her drink over _again_ , which made both of them laugh.

They talked more on the way up to his apartment. Clarke’s tongue was looser then. A few moments before they reached the entrance to his building, Clarke had latched a hand onto his arm and said, “You remind me of my dad.”

Bellamy looked at her funny. “That a good thing?”

She nodded. Her head felt too heavy for her shoulders. “Very good thing. He was my favorite person. And he was smart, and grumpy, just like you.” She’d poked him in the cheek as she’d said it, but Bellamy’s smile dropped.

“He was?”

He stopped to enter his building code and pull her through the entrance. Clarke stumbled a little, and he caught her in his side. They stayed like that while they waited for the elevator.

“He was.” She confirmed. “He’s dead now. We got in a car accident when I was in high school.”

“We?”

“We.”

Bellamy had been very quiet as they stepped into the elevator. He pressed the button for his floor, and they rode up in silence. He only spoke again when they were right outside his door, as he fiddled with his keys.

“My mom died my senior year,” He said, looking hard at the doorknob.

“That’s shitty.” Clarke said.

“Yeah.”

Then he pushed open the door and led her inside. His roommate was on the couch playing video games. He gave them a tired look when they entered.

“You could’ve given me a heads up.”

“This is Clarke,” Bellamy balled up his jacket and threw it at the other boy, “She’s just using our laundry room and then I’m taking her home.”

“I’m Clarke!” She chirped. The roommate raised an amused hand.

“Miller.”

“Come on,” Bellamy put a hand on the small of her back and led her to his room. “I’ll give you something to change into. Any preference?”

“Why is it so hot in here?”

“Radiator broke a few days ago.”

“Well, then give me the least amount of clothes you have.” She announced, flopping down on his bed. She saw Bellamy smile before he turned around to dig through his dresser.

“I hope it’s okay,” He mumbled eventually, “I left most of my shorts at home, didn’t think I’d need them during the winter, and the two pairs I have are both in the dirty laundry…” He handed her two items. A t-shirt with some rock band on it, and a pair of patterned boxers. “They’re clean.” He offered.

“Owls.” Clarke responded. Bellamy’s face went red.

“It was a gag gift from my sister a long time ago.”

“Owls?”

“Yeah,” He coughed awkwardly, “For Athena. Greek goddess of wisdom.”

Clarke shrugged. “Cool.”

She’d waited on the couch in Bellamy’s shirt and underwear while he went down to the laundry room with her clothes. She’d protested, but he had assured her it was fine and she should probably sit down and drink some water anyway. When he returned to the apartment two hours later, Clarke had an empty brita in front of her, and she was getting her ass handed to her in Mario Kart. She let Miller destroy her once more before Bellamy decided it was time to take her home.

(She’d asserted _vehemently_ that Bellamy was under no circumstances to put her almost-too-small skinny jeans in the dryer, so she was walking back in a crop top and owl boxers. She thought it was kind of a look at the time. Bellamy told her the heeled booties were a nice touch, and if she’d pretended the sidewalk was a catwalk for a good three blocks, who was to blame her?)

When they got back to her dorm, she gave Bellamy her number, and she thanked him for his hospitality, and then they were friends.

And life was better with Bellamy.

He had a way about him unlike anything Clarke had ever known. A raw, gravely realness to him that she could scrape her palms against. She had never before been so grateful to bleed.

Bellamy would talk to her about anything. Her difficult girlfriend, her father, the state of American politics. She could ask him which M&M he thought was the kindest, and he’d scratch his chin and tilt his head and tell her the yellow one, and she’d know he meant it. That was the thing: he never took anything Clarke gave him for granted.

So, Clarke gave him everything. All of the sadness, and anger, and guilt, and confusion. All of her tantrums and her tears, and her shame. She gave him her theories about the universe, and her favorite songs, and her half-finished paintings. Her laughs. Her smallest smiles. She gave it all to Bellamy. She doesn’t think there’s a person who knows her better in the world.

And of course, she’s thought about it before. She thought about it the moment they first met, when she was pressing her hands to the hard line of muscles under his shirt. But Bellamy’s warmth is not something she would gamble on a night both of them might regret. She had known the world to be cold for too long.

Besides, that was years ago. Any lingering attraction she feels for Bellamy is purely physical, because she’s only human, and she can appreciate the view. Which she does regularly now that they live together, because he favors existing in a perpetual state of partial nudity.

“Don’t you ever get cold?” Clarke had grumbled one night as he settled into the couch next to her, chest bare.

“Nope.” She could see his wolffish grin out of the corner of her eye, “Perfectly toasty.”

“I just think it’s rude that you constantly walk around naked when I live here too.”

“Nothing’s stopping you from walking around naked, Clarke,” He said, “Certainly not me.” Clarke had whacked him with a pillow.

In the three days since he told her about Raven, Clarke hasn’t seen Bellamy without a shirt once. She noticed yesterday that he had brought a pile of clothes with him into the bathroom to change into after his shower. It’s not the lack of nudity that bothers her, exactly. It’s the reinstatement of some kind of boundary between them. Clarke is here, and Bellamy is there, and she had forgotten what it was like when they lived on different planes of existence.

They don’t talk about it.

Or, Bellamy behaves like normal, and Clarke avoids looking him in the eye as much as possible. He makes her dinner, and she thanks him for it before huffing out an excuse about an essay she needs to write for her gender studies class, and eats alone in her room. She stares at her computer screen, at the essay she wrote a week ago, and cries a little bit. She never thought she’d feel so uneasy in this apartment. The tension in her shoulders is usually reserved for the hallways of her mother’s house.

It shouldn’t be a big deal, she tells herself. But it feels like her muscles are straining to break through her skin. This is Bellamy and Raven. If something were to break between them, it would tear Clarke in half. And both of them have already dealt with so much hurt in their lives. They lost Wells only six months ago, how would either of them handle losing someone else? Didn’t they think of that?

(And, a selfish part of Clarke wants them to have thought of _her_. She wants both of them to love her the most. Why doesn’t anyone ever love her the most?)

Bellamy knocks on her door later to ask if she has any laundry she needs done, and she lies to him again. There’s a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of her closet, but she doesn’t think she can give him any part of her right now.

“I just think it’s _weird_ ,” She tells Octavia over lattes. “Don’t you think it’s weird?”

“It’s definitely weird,” Octavia says carefully, blowing on her coffee, “But it also kinda makes sense.”

Clarke stares at her. “In _what_ world?”

“They’re good friends. They’re both hot. Both single.” She pauses there for some reason, and Clarke doesn’t have the time to dwell on why, “Both sexually frustrated. Why shouldn’t they bang one out every once in a while?”

“Because it’s _Bellamy and Raven_ ,” The words taste so sour on Clarke’s tongue. She almost wants to gag. Her mouth has never made such a strange shape around the edges of Bellamy’s name before. “What if it ends badly?”

“Then, they will deal with it like the mature, consenting adults that they are.” Octavia promises, “Besides, it’s not like this is the first time they’ve slept together.”

And Clarke knows, logically, that the speed of sound is 770 miles per hour. But the words that tumble out of Octavia’s mouth in that moment come to her very slowly, one at a time, each one a sharp pain in her head. She watches as Octavia freezes in place, eyes widening, bringing her coffee to her lips – whether she does it to cover her own guilt or to attempt to stop the sound from traveling through the air, Clarke doesn’t know. But she’s too late.

When they were little, Clarke and Wells would hang off the edge of his swimming pool, legs dangling over the deep end. Wells always had a pair of goggles on that made him look kind of funny, because he was afraid to open his eyes underwater.

_1, 2, 3_ , Clarke would say, and they’d go down, down, racing to see who could sit on the bottom and then return to the surface first. Sometimes they’d mix it up – do a handstand at the bottom, twirl like a torpedo on the way up. They’d argue about who cheated when, if Clarke let go off the side too early or if Wells really touched his butt to the floor, and to settle the score, they’d do it again. And again. It was their favorite summer game.

Then something in Clarke shifted. Wells had challenged her to see who could lay on their stomachs on the bottom the longest, and after a few moments, Clarke felt her ears blow out. She pounded at the side of her skull. She’d seen Wells’ eyebrows raise above his goggles before she clawed at the water and fought her way up. When she broke the surface, she was heaving, opening her jaw as far as it would go in an attempt to pop her ears. Wells had come up beside her, but whatever he said to her was muffled. Eventually, she’d clamped her eyes and mouth shut and blew out of her nose as hard as she could. When the sounds of the world returned to her, she hauled herself over the edge of the pool and onto the concrete.

(“Does that mean I won?” Wells had joked. Clarke snapped his goggles like a bra strap.)

Sitting in a café with Octavia, Clarke feels like she is back in the deep end. The pressure behind her eyes nearly blinds her.

“What?” She says dumbly – numbly.

“Okay, do _not_ tell Bellamy I told you this, but it’s no big deal.” Octavia confesses, trying desperately to play off her own error, “It only happened once. The night you first introduced them.” Clarke thinks that her head might explode.

She thinks back to that night. “No –” Flashes of hands. Spilled drinks. Blood dripping down Bellamy’s face. “No, they hated each other when they first met.” Suddenly, she hears herself, her words from that night echoing around her.

She’d been dabbing at Bellamy’s eye with a wet napkin, misunderstanding long since explained. He was pouting, like usual, not even the new drink Clarke had bought him putting him into better spirits. She’d touched a particularly sensitive spot of his cheek and then glanced over at Raven, who was icing her knuckles. _You know_ , Clarke mused, _defending my honor? It was kinda hot._ She remembers how it made Raven smile.

_It was kinda hot_. Clarke feels like her brain is leaking out her ears. It _was_ hot. Why shouldn’t Bellamy have thought so too?

Octavia’s hand finds hers on the table. “They just didn’t want you to freak out. You know, like you’re doing right now.”

“I’m not freaking out.”

“Clarke.”

Clarke levels with her. Octavia’s voice is comforting, but her eyes are swirling and deep, full of embarrassment and pity. Clarke can barely stand the sight.

But Octavia softens. “If it really mattered to them, they would’ve told you.”

She doesn’t know which is worse.

The subway is nearly empty when Clarke steps on, and she practically collapses in her seat. She thinks her brain might be completely fried, because after thirty minutes of having no coherent thoughts except _besides it’s not like this is the first time they’ve slept together it was kinda hot it only happened once the night you first introduced them it was kinda hot it was kinda hot_ , she finds herself only thinking about Octavia.

They’re close friends, Clarke knows this, but she’s never been sure if their relationship is because of Bellamy or _only_ for Bellamy. He had practically vibrated out of his skin the first time they met – the two most important women in his life, he’d admitted to her in a moment of vulnerability that she never felt courageous enough to bring up again. They’d fumbled a little, trying to figure out how they both fit into Bellamy’s life. Clarke had been so afraid of crossing some line with Octavia – at the time, she had only just returned to school after a mental breakdown. Clarke didn’t really know what to say to her.

But they made it work, anyway. Octavia was the person she talked to about normal people things – about her shitty professors, and bad dates that she went on, and TV shows she started that Octavia simply _had_ to watch immediately. Bellamy was the person that made her happy, but Octavia was her happy person. She’s never really thought twice about the superficiality of that. At a certain point, she doesn’t really care. It’s nice to have someone who has never known the sound of your sadness.

When she gets home, there is a note on the counter – Bellamy really is a cranky, old man at heart – that tells her he’s out for the night and he’ll see her in the morning. Clarke has to physically choke back the bile that threatens to make its way out of her mouth.

Two years they’d been keeping a secret from her. Two years she’d been unintentionally lying to herself when she prided herself on knowing everything about them. The two most important people in her life.

_If it really mattered to them,_ Octavia had said, _they would’ve told you._

This time, Bellamy told her.

Clarke throws up once, and then buries herself under her covers and tries to sleep. When the nightmares come, there is no one around to pull her out of the water. And she drowns. Over and over again. _Maybe Wells was lucky_ , she thinks, _he only did it once._

Halfway through the night, the water turns to blood. Clarke is sure it isn’t hers.

Bellamy confronts her two days later.

She’s standing at the kitchen counter waiting for the machine to spit out her coffee when he comes to stand in the doorframe. That’s the first thing she notices – that he stands inside it, doesn’t lean against it comfortably as usual, doesn’t relax the muscles in his legs. At first, she thinks he’s poised to run. She realizes after a glance at his face that he’s ready to fight.

“You haven’t spoken to me in five days.”

Clarke swallows hard. The machine sputters next to her, and she grabs her mug, uses preparing her coffee as an excuse not to look at him. “I’ve spoken to you.”

“I’m not counting ‘good morning’ and ‘are you done in the bathroom’.”

“I’ve just been busy.” She lies, ripping a sugar packet and dumping it in. Bellamy’s always telling her one of these days she’s going to develop diabetes, but she can’t stand the stuff without it.

“Clarke,” He says, impossibly soft, “You can’t even look at me.”

It’s the hurt in his voice that gives her pause. She lays her palms flat on the counter, taking a deep breath. She doesn’t want to hurt Bellamy. She’s never wanted anything but good for him. He deserves good. And, she figures, he deserves an explanation. But even she can’t seem to put into words how numb her body has gone the past few days.

She meets his eye. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“I just –” She doesn’t want to lie to him anymore, but telling him her selfish thoughts about him and Raven would make her seem like a crazy person, and she can’t have Bellamy look at her that way – he’s the only person who has never looked at her that way. “I miss Wells.” She finishes lamely. It’s true, at least.

This is the part where Bellamy will usually trudge over and envelop her in his arms, where he’ll stroke her hair and listen to her cry, and look at her with those big brown eyes and tell her he’s there for her.

Instead, he stays where he is, and he says, “Me too.”

Somehow, it hurts more.

“But we both know this isn’t just about Wells.” Clarke wants to look away so badly as the words leave his mouth, but she feels like if she does, something between them would truly break. Her mind goes of its own accord to Harry Potter of all things, and the scene in her favorite movie where Harry and Voldemort’s spells battle against each other on their way to their intended targets. The magic pushes and pulls, beating against one another until one wizard finds the strength to _be_ stronger. She feels stupid for thinking of it now. But the force between her and Bellamy is almost tangible.

“I don’t care about you and Raven.”

“There is no me and Raven!” He insists, running a hand through his hair, “Okay? It’s just physical. It means nothing.”

_If it really mattered to them, they would’ve told you._

“Then why didn’t you tell me the first time?”

Her words settle heavily over the room. Bellamy’s face goes through a range of emotions before he finally looks away – and Clarke prides herself on not being the first to do so. His mouth settles into a hard line, and Clarke’s seen Bellamy in countless fights, but she doesn’t think she’s ever known him to look like this. The sharpness in his teeth, she knows. But this isn’t sharp. This is jagged.

“How long have you known about that?”

“Does it matter?”

He meets her eye again, and Clarke sees a decision in them. His shoulders slump forward. “It was a long time ago.” He says, and she knows in that moment that they aren’t going to fight today. Bellamy has read every book on the great military leaders of the world. He knows when to retreat.

( _Patroclus_ , she remembers, _who died to spur Achilles back into action after he walked away from the fight. One of these days, she’s going to have to climb the great wall of Troy so that Bellamy is forced to hold her again, even if she is no longer part of that body. It will be worth it just to hear him scream._ )

“Okay.” She says today.

“I don’t want you to not talk to me. I need you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop. Stop apologizing. You know,” He catches his lip between his teeth, breathing out hard. “You know I’d forgive you for anything.”

And before she can think of a response, before she can even really process the words that he has lobbed at her throat, Bellamy says, “Your coffee’s getting cold”, and leaves the room.

That night, she goes out alone for the first time in months. She hasn’t _felt_ so lonely in a long time. As she sits at a bar and drinks, she finds herself wishing for hands, craving the touch of someone who has never seen her cry.

She gets her wish in the form of eyes so blue they’re almost clear. Eyes she hasn’t seen in over two years.

“Lexa,” She breathes out. The name sits so comfortably on her tongue.

“Clarke,” The blue eyes say back. Clarke is almost ashamed to see herself reflected in them.

They talk for a while.

At first, it’s polite conversation. Lexa tells her about how she heads the student government at her school, and Clarke briefly recounts the story of how she’d managed to pull her own gallery opening last year. At some point, Clarke orders another round for the both of them, because her parents raised her to be polite, and she cannot possibly sit here in polite agreement without more alcohol in her veins.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t foresee how that could backfire until she’s blurting out, “What you did to me was really shitty.”

Lexa pauses with the lip of her glass in her mouth. Slowly, she sets it down on the table, taking her time to dab at her chin with a napkin. Clarke is squeezing her cup so tightly she thinks it may shatter in her hands.

( _Good_ , she thinks, _maybe all the blood would finally make Lexa understand._ )

“I know,” She says eventually. “It was never my intention to hurt you.”

“But you did.”

“I know,” Again. Somewhere in the back of Clarke’s mind she notes that it’s not an apology. “I wasn’t in a good place, then. I was mad at the world and mad at myself and I took it out on you.”

“You just left,” Clarke fiddles with her napkin, “I needed you, and you left.” She doesn’t want to think about how bad she was freshman year, how she thought leaving her mother’s home would be the easiest thing in the world, and how she was so sorely mistaken. She doesn’t want to remember how many times she had to recount the sad story of her life – how she hadn’t anticipated how draining it would be when everyone didn’t just _know_. She doesn’t want to remember how many people heard her sad story and abandoned her, too. Lexa had been one of them.

“I had family matters to deal with,” She admits, “I’m sure you understand.” And the worst part is that Clarke does.

“Everything okay?” She hears herself asking.

(Is it bad that she tastes something bitter in her mouth when Lexa nods in response?)

“The people I cared about were in trouble,” _Fuck_ , why does she always have to be so goddamn cryptic, “So I had to make a choice. I don’t regret that decision, but I do regret that I caused you pain.”

If it were another night, perhaps Clarke would simply take that explanation and go. She would call it closure, and she would put it in the compartment at the back of her mind where she has held Lexa captive for years. But tonight, Clarke is hungry, and some sadistic part of her craves to be held by someone who isn’t afraid to leave bruises.

She tastes blood in her mouth, metallic and salty, just like in her dreams. She forces herself to swallow.

“Do you want to go back to mine?”

Clarke is almost sad at how she fills her own body. She hasn’t been able to leave it since that moment with Bellamy in the kitchen. _I need you_ , he’d said. So, she stayed.

Which means she was _there_ with Lexa, the entire night. She felt Lexa’s hands, and her lips, and she stared into those blue, blue eyes. Deep in the night, she listened to Lexa’s heartbeat through her chest. It was faster than Bellamy’s. Almost like it was out of rhythm.

She felt the thought of Bellamy like a punch to the gut. She’d done this to hurt him, she thinks. Somehow, in some way, she’d wanted him to feel it, like she felt it. She’d done it on purpose. And it wasn’t the Other Clarke, it was her. It was all her.

In the morning, the other side of the bed is cold, and Clarke hears stilted conversation in the kitchen. Panic spikes in her chest as she pulls on the first pajamas she can grab and stumbles into the other room.

Lexa is at the table with a plate of pancakes in front of her, looking intently at the column of Bellamy’s spine as he bends over the griddle.

“Morning!” She greets them a little too loudly. Both of them turn to her. Bellamy waves his spatula lightly before he turns bright red and goes back to his pancakes. Lexa smiles kindly.

“Good morning. Bellamy was nice enough to make me some breakfast.”

“I see that,” Clarke isn’t quite sure if she wants to sit down, but a sharp pain in her stomach betrays her, “Are there any for me?”

Bellamy wordlessly scoops a few pancakes off the griddle and loads them onto a plate, delivering it to the table in a flash.

“Thanks.” Clarke says to his back.

“Mhm.” He grunts. If she leans, Clarke can see a hint of a smile on his face.

When Lexa leaves, she realizes why. In her hurry to get dressed, she had grabbed the pair of his boxers that he’d given her the night they met. She’d never given them back, and he had never asked for them. Usually, she put them on under a pair of sweatpants when she was feeling down, and they comforted her. Today, the owls seem to be laughing at her expense.

_Goddess of wisdom_ , they choke out between giggles, _yeah right._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is literally a disaster im sorry
> 
> again unbeta'd so prob too many mistakes to count but you know what <3 you could say the same about s7 <3


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